


Love and/or Mercy

by slartibartfast



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Queer Themes, Redemption, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 11:05:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15750405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slartibartfast/pseuds/slartibartfast
Summary: Nebula did not have an easy life before Thanos found her and it gave her a different kind of strength.





	Love and/or Mercy

 

On this planet the sun rises more dramatically than most. One moment they walk through the dusty fields lit only by the fires of their arrival; the next, Nebula blinks through the red light and sees the mundane reality of their destruction.

Once, Nebula would have felt disgust or fear at the sight of so many dead creatures spread out in front of them. The hot stink of blood would have turned her stomach but, after a particularly brutal fight six weeks ago, she no longer has one.

A young child with grey curls on her head and wide yellow eyes sits beneath a gnarled tree, watching Nebula’s patrol. Thanos has not seen this overlooked child yet; he is overseeing the plundering of the grain stores, because for all that he claims to work for the good of the universe he also works for the good of his pockets. This grain is sweet and rare and coveted on nearby planets almost more than gold.

Nebula does not hesitate to approach the child and the child does not run. Does she see some kindness in Nebula’s dark eyes? If she does, she is a trusting fool too swaddled by a peaceful life to see the danger walking toward her, blade drawn.

There is nothing left of Nebula now. Nothing of that frightened, wide-eyed child dragged from her home. Nebula remembers a time when she cried almost every day; a time when a cut from the kitchen knife on the soft skin of her knuckles could break her. Now she is broken every single hour with cold stares and colder metal and that pathetic child is gone.

It is easy to slide a knife across the narrow throat. 

Thanos will never understand true mercy.

 

**

 

Nebula cannot tell if there is any flesh in her new eye. She pokes it and it gives, soft and firm all at once like ripe fruit. Damp, but never with tears, not now. The world is sharper now and she can see more; the dust motes floating like stars around Gamora’s head, each individual hair on her sister’s head, perfect and unruffled.

Thanos ordered her eye replaced when some small weakness was discovered inside it. Some slight mishap of biology. “Your new one will be better,” Thanos promised. Threatened.

There are no bars between them but both know the risk of crossing the floor, so they do not. Thanos does not need to keep his slaves in chains. Nebula pokes her eye again and slowly, with great discomfort, turns her head toward her sister.

“Gamora,” she says. Her voice is still thin from the last ‘upgrade’. From screaming until her vocal chords shredded and bled and were replaced.

Though Gamora is awake with eyes open she does not move or look at Nebula. Nor does she speak for a long, cold moment, and when she does it cuts like a blade. “Go to sleep, Nebula.”

“My eye,” Nebula says. 

A memory, rare now. Her mothers smiling together, kneeling in the soft silt of the riverbank as Nebula swims in the cool water. The warmth of their smiles, the soft darkness of their eyes like the promise of a good night’s sleep. 

Something in the silence left by this unwanted memory causes Gamora to sit up, legs swung over the edge of the bed. Nebula lifts her gaze to her sister, to the golden dust around her.

“Does it hurt?” Gamora asks.

Nebula stares. How can Gamora be so oblivious after all she has seen? Nebula decides not to answer such a ridiculous question. She cannot tell whether it is to protect herself or her sister from the answer. Either is a pointless endeavour.

“Does it look the same?” Nebula asks instead.

Something in Gamora’s hard face softens. “There is… metal around it.”

“But the eye,” Nebula says, insistent for reasons she can’t understand herself. “Does it look the same?”

“Yes,” Gamora says. It’s clear she doesn’t understand. For one quiet, strange moment Nebula is almost tempted to tell her sister about her mothers on the side of the lake, about the way they always looked at Nebula with such love from their galaxy-deep gazes.

Then, of course, Gamora speaks again. “I never thought of you as vain, sister.”

Nebula stares for a moment longer. She cannot tell if Gamora is teasing as she used to or whether her words were meant to hurt; it doesn’t matter. Nebula folds up the last scraps of the memories she holds and tucks them away where they are safe and where they will not be seen.

Then she turns her back on her sister and closes her eyes.

 

**

 

The two are still children, though only just. They fight whenever Thanos can find time to order it; the rest of the time they practice. They are trusted with the strongest weapons and solitude that most would not get. 

They have proved that they are their own jailors.

“We could do something else today,” Nebula says. The dusty Titan air is dense today but the sky is beautiful, all lit up with red and orange and streaks of gold so intense it almost glitters. The edge of the moon sits at the horizon, casting strange shadows on the ruins. Gamora lifts her arm, flexing it into a triangle over her head, hand pressing down her own back. Stretching as though Nebula has not spoken. She tries again. “Gamora.”

“What would you have us do, sister?” Gamora asks without looking at her. Her tone is mild but Nebula knows her sister’s moods as well as her own. Her irritation is as thick as the air. 

Nebula would usually back down and settle into a fighting pose but this morning she woke with the feeling of river water on her skin, the memory of her mothers too close to the surface. A stubborn jolt pushes her forward. “We could play.”

The suggestion gets Gamora’s full attention at last. Her eyes sharpen in the strange light and she lowers her arms, flexing her hands at her sides. There is a hardness to Gamora that was not born of Thanos’s attention but there are a handful of times, like now, where Nebula has seen it soften.

“What would you like to play?”

**

The tall columns of this city crumbled haphazardly. Gamora pushed Nebula from the path of one of them and almost lost her own life for it, but neither of them mentioned that and Gamora knew there would be no gratitude for saving a life not wanted.

Neither of them mentioned it later, unwilling to break the rare silence. 

When they fought a week later, another show for their father-captor’s arrogance, Gamora’s wrist flicked a second before she moved. Nebula’s dark eyes fixed on that movement, a tell where Gamora did not give them. A trick? Time turned to syrup around her. Nebula crouched, body angled right, thin swords ready. When Gamora swung it was the expected arm. 

The shock of it brought a new brightness to this dull scene. A thrill of triumph as Nebula used that tell against her sister, swinging her blade up at the right moment to slice through the skin and tendon and muscle of Gamora’s bare arm. Blood sprayed hot between them. Nebula pushed up from her haunches and slid her blade beneath Gamora’s chin and watched, mind still, as blood dripped down her neck.

“You should have gone for the throat,” Thanos said.

Gamora’s eyes held nothing and gave even less away as she used her smallest blade to stab Nebula in the side of her neck.

 

**

 

The war started long before Nebula carried enough years with her to understand it. Her first parents died six months before her new parents found Nebula on the side of the road, wrist thin as the dry reeds beside the once swollen river. 

Siante, with her skin as deep as the ocean and her eyes as bright as the night sky, washed Nebula’s cold form and dressed her in the warmest clothes she could find. It was Lun, paler and more prone to smiling, who fed them all with her hunting bow and her excellent eye for the last of the berries. It was a good life for a while. Nebula walked with them or rode on their backs and slept quietly in their small, ragged tent in the hills. 

Three years passed in this quiet, migratory way. The three of them went where the water was, knowing the risks and accepting them. They stayed far from the cities and the fires and the fighting. When the sky filled with strange objects they knew, all three of them, what was to come. Though perhaps Nebula misremembers that; perhaps she was still naive then.

Nebula was, after all, placid enough as Siante took her down to the river. Two weeks after the sky-ships came, Nebula still stared at them as she walked as if letting them out of her sight would rain destruction on them. Or maybe she just found them pretty. Nebula understands now that memory is not always as reliable as you’d wish, even in those bright spots of the past that you consider absolute in their certainty.

The river swelled a week ago, though for two days it ran a pale pink colour, then a rich red, and now back to a muddy grey. Nebula stepped into it as easily as the first time her mothers washed her.

“It’s best if you don’t fight,” Siante said.

Nebula tilted her head. She remembers the confusion. “I never do.”

Swift, light thuds gripped at Siante’s attention. She turned to watch her wife run toward them and pull her back. “Not yet. It’s not time.”

“Of course it’s time,” Siante said. Nebula noticed, now, how tense both her mothers had become over the last few weeks. How tight their voices stayed even when they weren’t calling for Nebula to run, run,  _ run _ . “We’ve already waited too long. You know that.”

“Should I get out of the water?” Nebula asked. Perhaps this was a game. Yes, Nebula was naive back then, even as a quick and vicious argument unfolded in front of her and, after that, both her mothers knelt neatly at the riverbank.

“We love you, Nebula.” A goodbye. Perhaps an apology in advance for their failure to take the last breath from her in time.

“I love you too,” she promised the moment she sunk beneath the muddy water. It was the only time in her life she understood that to be true until she saw Gamora’s wrist twitch mid-fight.

 

**

 

Though Nebula does not know it, only a year stands between her and a dubious freedom. She walks at Thanos’s side still but Gamora is gone and, despite an idle hope, his appreciation has not shifted to Nebula in her wake. This planet smells of grass though it bears none; the ground is dust so fine that it coats Nebula’s skin and makes her long for a cool bath.

Out of the corner of her eye, movement. A flickering of light against glimmering green fabric. Nebula knows Thanos did not see it though that doesn’t guarantee he doesn’t know the child is there.

“I saw something,” Nebula says. Thanos has long since scratched all emotion from her tone so it is easy to keep level as she turns toward the pile of rocks and metal. 

“Be quick,” Thanos says, dismissive. “We have places to go.”

Nebula nods and draws her sword. She makes no sound as she crosses the courtyard. The child stares at Nebula as though she is nothing but an interesting animal crossing her path. This child does not flinch from her, not even when she lifts her sword.

“Have you seen my brother?” the child asks, then adds, “you have beautiful eyes.”

A pause. Nebula sheathes her sword, surprised by her own daring. Yet if a child as small as this can show strength, why can’t Nebula? If she cannot fight Thanos with her weapons, perhaps something else will do. Perhaps her mothers had made the wrong choice after all in the face of an uncertain fate.

“Get further behind the rock,” Nebula says. “If you do not, you will die and never see your brother again. Though it’s possible he’s already dead in which case you will have a difficult road ahead of you.” Better than no road at all. “Do you understand?”

The child nods and shifts backward, holding Nebula’s gaze for as long as she can. Grateful and quiet in her gratitude. Nebula leaves her flask behind and, she suspects, something else too. 

“What was it?” Thanos asked upon her return to his side.

“A child,” Nebula says, voice dull. Not a lie so Thanos does not catch her in it.

He is, after all he has done and all he wishes for, unimaginative. Nebula walks through the dust of another planet ruined in the name of some cruel ‘balance’ and learns two essential things that will keep her going through the roughest times to come.

First: death is not the only mercy born of love.

Second: Thanos will one day lose, and Nebula will be the one to witness his last painful breath.


End file.
